Ever wonder why so many Greek statues are naked?

Is it about beauty, desire,  or something else entirely? Bodies are a subject of fascination in art,   whether decked out in status  symbols or wearing nothing at all.

And there’s a good reason why. All through the ages, many of our most  famous artworks have featured the human form. Despite our many differences, we all have a body.

But we don’t all experience it the same way,   and there are competing ideas  about what makes a body beautiful. On top of that, our notions of beauty and   difference have changed and  continue to change over time. And all of that makes for some fascinating art.

Hi! I'm Sarah Urist Green, and  this is Crash Course Art History. [THEME MUSIC] When you think about bodies and art,   one of the first things that comes  to mind might be the portrait. From the Mona Lisa to that selfie from your recent   trip – portraits are a record of a  body at a particular moment in time.

But portraits can show us a lot more about a person than just what they looked like. They can tell us about a person’s class status,  values, character, and social influence. These details aren’t always obvious, though.

Like with any artistic representation, it  helps to know what symbols to look out for. For example, a subject’s  clothes can tell us a lot. Like, these ancestor portraits, created during  China’s Qing Dynasty in the 18th century,   were commissioned by wealthy families  to showcase their lineage and status.

Hung on the walls of homes, the  portraits honored departed loved ones,   allowing them to be remembered  by family, friends, and guests. Shi Wenying and Lady Guan’s style of dress shows  the viewer where they sit on the social ladder. Shi Wenying was a lieutenant-general in the   military, which the artist communicates  with the peacock feather and fur coat.

These are symbols that people of the Qing dynasty,  who valued military service, wealth,  and power, would have respected. In Lady Guan’s portrait, she dons a  full-length courtly dress, which was   only worn by high-ranking officials and nobles. And note the three earrings.

They identify Guan as a Manchu woman, part of  the lineage that established the Qing dynasty. Though they didn’t have filters  or Photoshop like we do now,   portraits have always contained  some… embellishments on the truth. For example, the artist never  actually saw Lady Guan in person!

It wasn’t considered proper for women of the  time to keep company with unfamiliar men. The artist relied on other people’s  verbal descriptions of her face. So the portrait is an idealized version of her,  based more on imagination than observation.

But portraits are never really  “real” or truthful anyway. That’s because they freeze a body’s  appearance at a moment in time,   when in reality we’re always changing. Both because we age and also because we’re  always being seen from different perspectives.

By others, and by ourselves. American artist Cindy Sherman has captured  the fluidity of identity in her work over   the last several decades, including her  1970s series, “Untitled Film Stills.” In it, she dressed and posed herself in  a variety of portraits that reference   stereotypical female characters in films. In one, she’s a housewife  standing over the kitchen sink.

In another, she’s tangled in the  sheets gazing wistfully off-camera. Next, she’s a student reaching for a library book,  or a fashionable woman walking down a city street. Each image could be read in numerous  ways, depending on your background,   generation, or just which movies you’ve seen.

In this way, Sherman turns  her body into a blank canvas,   reflecting society’s many and often  contradictory expectations of women. Her work reminds us that how we see ourselves,  and how society sees us, is always changing. Of course, not all bodies in art are clothed.

Some of the most famous ones are decidedly not. This goes way back to Classical  Greek and Roman sculpture,   which celebrated the nude figure  as the pinnacle of beauty. And because art students during the  Renaissance and beyond studied these classics,   European art from the 15th to the 20th  century has no shortage of nude bodies.

Who can be found reclining on  beds, clouds, and even on satyrs. Classical male nudes exhibited perfect  athletic forms, embodying strength,   beauty, and determination —  the ideal masculine figure. Of course, most ancient Greeks  didn’t actually look like this.

In general, this look was about  aspiration and admiration, not reality. And men in these cultures weren’t just  valued for their physical prowess — their   chiseled bods were also considered  to be a sign of moral superiority. Male nudes were typically shown confidently,  with weapons and… you know, tough-guy stuff.

Female nudes, on the other hand, were usually  representations of sensuality and fertility. At the same time, they had to demonstrate modesty. Here, you can see how Aphrodite  covers herself and averts her gaze.

So, while the male nude could be loud and proud,  the female nude generally exhibited some shame. An age-old trope that we’re  totally over now, right? In any case, the way we look at and interpret  a subject in art, especially a human subject,   changes based on the power dynamics between  the viewer and the thing being viewed.

In art history, we refer to  this dynamic as the gaze. So, since pretty much all artists in  classical Greek and Roman cultures were men,   they were often imagined as  the default audience for art. Men were the ones looking or gazing at  art, and women were objects to be gazed at.

You can see this perspective in  how nudes are typically posed. Female nudes tend to lie helpless and passive,   inviting the viewer to look  at, and maybe lust after, them. Whereas male nudes are given a place of equal,  or often higher, footing relative to the viewer.

We gaze up at their greatness  and watch them mid-action,   while female nudes are more static, and  generally below the level of male figures. Sadly this is not a relic of the past,  which is why you might hear the phrase   “the male gaze” being thrown  about in cultural conversation. And it’s also why Captain America poses  like this…and Black Widow poses like this.

Of course, in art history as in life,  males don’t always desire females,   and females don’t always  want to be desired by males. There’s an entire spectrum of gender  and sexuality that is occasionally,   if infrequently, reflected in art. Like, we know that there were lots of  Greek and Roman sculptures featuring   the intersex figure of Hermaphroditus,  child of the gods Aphrodite and Hermes.

But these sculptures have frequently been  left out of the conversation because they   don’t conform to traditional ideas  about gender and heterosexual desire. Thankfully, artists have been  challenging these dynamics for decades. For example, American artist Cassils  is transgender and uses their body   to critique narrow ideas of gender and  the complicated dynamics of the gaze.

In their 2012 performance piece, “Becoming an  Image,” a nearly nude Cassils kicks, punches,   and attacks a two-thousand-pound block of clay. Performed in almost total darkness,  the only time the audience, or Cassils,   can see, is when a photographer lights  the room with their camera’s flash. The artist’s body is as much a part of the  performance as the clay, and the fight between   the two can be seen as representing the ongoing  struggle of trans communities to simply exist.

The audience is given no choice but to  gaze upon Cassils’ body, but their view   is thoroughly incomplete, captured only during  these fractured moments of intense violence. In this powerful work,   Cassils reclaims power over their body  by both revealing it and taking it away. We, the audience, are left with an  unforgettable reminder of the frequent   violence that occurs against  trans people around the world.

And we’re also left with many questions  about our own participation in this   continuing brutality—whether it’s, in the  artist’s words: “as victims or instigators,   as bystanders, as witnesses, and  as consumers of these stories.” But, social critique isn’t  unique to 21st-century art. Like, check out Edouard  Manet’s “Olympia,” from 1863. Manet paints a female nude who may be reclining,  but is not merely a passive victim of our gaze.

Olympia stares directly at us and  rests her hand casually over her lap,   controlling what we can and can’t see. The portrait shocked the  French public when it debuted. Manet’s painting references  a famous nude in art history,   Titian’s Venus of Urbino, but it  also strayed away from tradition.

Titian’s reclining nude is named after  the Roman goddess of love and beauty. She's in a wealthy Italian home,  gazing flirtatiously up at us as   her servants in the background  prepare her clothing for the day. But Manet’s model, Victorine Meurent,  portrays a sex worker— and perhaps was   a sex worker in real life, though  the historical record is unclear.

In any case, she ’s a working-class woman who is shown displaying   ownership over her body by–to some  degree– preventing us from looking. Instead of painting a delicate, modest  aristocrat, Manet presents us with an   ordinary woman who recognizes the power  of her body, and gazes right back. But Victorine isn’t the  only woman in this painting.

A Black woman, named Laure, is also shown,   though she didn’t get fully  credited as a model until 1999. Manet’s painting was completed only about fifteen   years after the abolition of  slavery in France in 1848. And it was still fairly commonplace for  European aristocrats to include Black   people in their portraits  in positions of servitude.

They were often portrayed as submissive,  visibly impoverished, or hypersexualized. Like peacock feathers and fur coats were  a symbol of power in Qing dynasty China,   in European paintings, servants  or enslaved people were often   included to reflect the status of the  wealthier white folks that were featured. As with Laure, these Black individuals — though  often real people — were rarely, if ever, named.

But some scholars have argued  Manet was pushing that envelope. He shows Laure neither  sexualized nor impoverished,   as a working-class woman alongside  another working-class woman. And when we think about the reality of the  painting’s creation, real-life Victorine   and Laure were quite literally doing  the same thing — being paid to model.

Still, Laure is placed in a  traditional act of service:   she’s an attendant to the more  empowered-seeming Victorine. So, when we look at this portrait through the lens  of both gender and race, it begs the question of   not only who gets power over their body, but  who gets to recline and who has to serve. The Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura pushes these   questions even closer to the surface  in his 1988 recreation of this work.

In it, he dresses in drag and  takes Victorine’s place on the bed. This urges viewers to consider how changing both   the gender and the ethnicity of the  subject changes its meaning entirely. Bodies in art are so much more than  sculpted abs and fleshy figures.

They serve a key role in  reflecting, and critiquing,   the complicated relationships we have  with other people, society, and ourselves. Analyzing these artworks can help  us better understand — and perhaps   disrupt— our biases toward  or against certain bodies. Both of the past, and today.

Looking at art together might even  help make this universal experience   of having a body one that's  more equitable for everybody. Next time, we’ll look at how  the global exchange of goods   and ideas has influenced art throughout history. I’ll see you there.

Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course  Art History which was filmed at the Indianapolis   Museum of Art at Newfields and was made with  the help of all these resourceful people. If you want to help keep Crash  Course free for everyone,   forever, you can join our community on Patreon.